Gæðastjórnunarkerfi : grunnatriði og íðorðasafn = Quality Management Systems : fundamentals and vocabulary.

The concept of Industry 4.0 means a new paradigm of modern manufacturing. This phenomenon requires continuous innovation processes and technological development from each enterprise. Traditional concepts of quality must absorb changes and prepare themselves for new challenges. The studies linked to successful adaptation to Industry 4.0 focus mostly on technical dimensions and forget the impact of organisational culture. One should, however, remember that quality culture plays a crucial role in the organisational culture of manufacturing enterprises with elements of quality management implemented. Developed quality cultures support the innovation environment, which is why it is necessary for the enterprises to identify the current level of their quality culture and detect significant factors that differentiate individual quality cultures and focus on them. Given this fact, the aim of the paper is to analyse the typical cultures and quality concepts and to detect the factors that differentiate individual quality cultures in Slovakia. We use data from our own survey; dependences were indicated by means of correspondence analysis and the test of proportion. The improvement and assurance of quality, the use of information and the overall effectiveness are significant factors detected by the discriminant analysis. The conclusions of the survey may be used by scientific researchers but especially by manufacturing enterprises interested in quality which are coming to terms with the era of Industry 4.0.

https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/8/4/124/pdf

Quality Culture of Manufacturing Enterprises: A Possible Way to Adaptation to Industry 4.0

Entrepreneurial support organizations (ESOs), such as incubators and accelerators, are now ubiquitous. Despite this proliferation, their impact on entrepreneurs, ventures, and communities remains u...

Helping Entrepreneurs Help Themselves: A Review and Relational Research Agenda on Entrepreneurial Support Organizations:

This paper re-examines the effects of total quality management (TQM) on firms’ financial performance by reviewing the findings of the empirical literature. It assesses the appropriateness of different financial measures while evaluating the impact of TQM as reported by various studies. We propose a new conceptual model to empirically test the effect of TQM implementation on financial performance – one that is meaningful for shareholders. There is near consensus that the overriding objective of a firm should be to maximize shareholders’ wealth. We conclude by briefly reviewing the methodological limitations inherent in studies in this field and recommend avenues for further empirical research on TQM’s impact on financial performance.

Does Total Quality Management Still Shine? Re-Examining the Total Quality Management Effect on Financial Performance

Voltage sag is a serious power quality phenomenon that threatens industrial manufacturing and residential electricity. A large-scale monitoring system has been established and continually improved to detect and record voltage sag events. However, the inefficient process of data sampling cannot provide valuable information early enough for governance of the system. Therefore, a novel online recognition method for voltage sags is proposed. The main contributions of this paper include: 1) The causes and waveform characters of voltage sags were analyzed; 2) according to the characters of different sag waveforms, 10 voltage sag characteristic parameters were proposed and proven to be effective; 3) a deep belief network (DBN) model was built using these parameters to complete automatic recognition of the sag event types. Experiments were conducted using voltage sag data from one month recorded by the 10 kV monitoring points in Suqian, Jiangsu Province, China. The results showed good performance of the proposed method: Recognition accuracy was 96.92%. The test results from the proposed method were compared to the results from support vector machine (SVM) recognition methods. The proposed method was shown to outperform SVM.

Online Recognition Method for Voltage Sags Based on a Deep Belief Network

Over the past 15 years, accelerators emerged as a popular and distinct new form of intermediary organization, playing a key role in supporting entrepreneurial and innovation activities. To date, despite significant growth in accelerators research, there is still little understanding of how different forms of accelerators operate, and what outcomes they produce across different contexts. This paper reviews the existing scholarly research on accelerators using the Context–Intervention–Mechanism–Outcome framework and is based on the analysis of 98 research papers on accelerators published in the last 15 years. The analysis identifies four mechanisms which explain how accelerators operate and the role they play in supporting entrepreneurship and innovation: the validation of ideas and products; the provision of product development and models learning; the provision of support to increase startups’ market access and growth; and the provision of support for innovation. The paper identifies the methodological and theoretical gaps in current research and provides avenues to support future research and industry practice.

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A systematic literature review on accelerators

In a context with an increased level of competitiveness, companies are more and more interested in aspects concerning sustainable development The implications of inadequate power quality (PQ) can determine important financial losses and influence companies’ sustainable development through the generated effects This article aims to facilitate the management of PQ by proposing a method for estimating the economic consequences of a poor PQ, with priority for the disturbances with significant economic effects To determine the total cost for each type of PQ perturbation that may occur a classification of cost categories was made such as interruptions, process slowdowns, equipment failure, equipment downtime, reduced energy efficiency, lower product quality, lower labor productivity, and other indirect costs Each PQ disturbance affects the final end-user differently For calculating the total value for each type of PQ issues, different calculation formulas have been proposed so that each perturbation includes only those components associated with that perturbation A case study was used to validate the proposed method Also, the paper includes a technical and economic analysis of the possible compensation solutions for PQ disturbances that may affect the studied company In conclusion, an understanding of PQ issues’ consequences and an appropriate approach to PQ compensation solutions can be beneficial to any electrical power end-user

https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/10/7/2326/pdf

Management of Power Quality Issues from an Economic Point of View

The high frequency of using projects in all fields determined the increasing importance of adequate project management. Considering the direct relationship between reaching projects’ objectives and the long term development of an organization, aspects regarding projects’ success and the success factors of projects are topics of great interest in project management literature. Reaching projects’ objectives in compliance with constraints of cost, time and performance is usually not sufficient to determine whether the project was successful or not. While literature provides different perspectives regarding this topic, in practice things get sometimes even more complicated, project success being often vaguely defined. This article aims to present an overview on the topic of project success and identify main success factors when dealing with projects using a quantitative research.

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Main factors influencing project success

Nowadays, projects are a common mean of organizing activities in all fields, aspects concerning project management representing a current research topic. While people are considered the most valuable asset of an organisation, project managers can be seen as key players for projects’ success, a topic of great interest due to the high number of failing projects. The research aims to identify the profile of an ideal project manager, by presenting an overview of studies regarding the profile of a good project manager and, on the other hand, by analysing the perceptions of organisations’ managers and HR specialists regarding the profile of the project manager. The research method is based on the conjoint analysis, for a more realistic approach. Thus, a controlled set of different project manager candidates’ profiles is presented in pairs to respondents, who are asked to express their preference. As a result, the article proposes an instrument applicable within any organisation, to identify the profile of the project manager best suited for the role. Firstly, the empirical research provides evidence that persons involved in project managers’ selection perceive the value of education, certification, experience or soft skills differently, based on their professional role. Secondly, it shows that project management certifications are relevant for project managers' selection and are much appreciated around the world. Although each project requires specific skills and competencies for the project manager, the research ascertains a preferred profile based on the perception of over one hundred respondents, involved in the selection process of project managers.

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Perceptions Regarding the Profile of an Ideal Project Manager

The current paper is part of a wider research that has as general objective to develop an evaluation and analysis model for the total quality management (TQM) system to identify best practices that determine its’ performance, in order to improve it. The research is focused on organizations from the metal construction industry. The sample consists of organizations from Romania operating in the before mentioned area, which have a consolidated position in the market and conducted efforts in implementing TQM systems. The data analysis was conducted through quantitative research methods, based on statistical processing. Regarding the research tools used for data collection, a survey based on a questionnaire was employed. The designed and pre-tested questionnaire contains items based on factors considered important in analysing and evaluating the TQM system, based on the evaluation criteria of the EFQM European Excellence Award (European Foundation for Quality Management), which provides credibility to the research. The objective of the present research is analysing the components of the TQM system, leadership and quality culture, in companies from the Romanian metal construction industry and their influence on customer relationship. The empirical research was conducted between September 2014 and August 2015, and the study is based on questioning 263 managers from 23 companies. The main research results show a very strong positive relation between the variables leadership, quality culture and customer relationship. It was also noticed that the management team of the analysed organizations is concerned with the continuous quality improvement process and that efforts are made for satisfying and exceeding customers’ expectations, thus existing the premises for creating customers’ dedicated organizations and achieving long term excellence. A surprising result concerning the leadership style favourable to quality culture’s development was obtained. The managers from the analysed organizations which have an authoritarian leadership style favour the development of a quality culture more than managers who adopt a democratic style.

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/196409/1/Article_2682.pdf

Ioana Beleiu

Papers

A systematic literature review on accelerators

Management of Power Quality Issues from an Economic Point of View

Main factors influencing project success

Perceptions Regarding the Profile of an Ideal Project Manager

The Impact of Quality Culture and Leadership on Customer Relationship in Organizations from the Romanian Metal Construction Industry